


Love in Winter

by whymzycal



Category: Saiyuki
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-22
Updated: 2010-05-22
Packaged: 2017-10-09 16:04:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whymzycal/pseuds/whymzycal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A bored genius almost finds love, then loses it. Unable to deal with his disappointment constructively, he destroys the world. Good times, kittens. Good times indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love in Winter

**Author's Note:**

> This shameless riff on (ripoff of?) Kurt Vonnegut's _Cat's Cradle_ was written for 7veilsphaedra in the 2009 Yuletide_Smut exchange on LJ. Any coincidences between this fic and the source material are entirely intentional and meant for the purpose of entertainment, nothing more. All section titles are either direct quotations or paraphrases from _Cat's Cradle._ Finally, a giant "thank you" to despina_moon and moshesque for their fab beta work. Please note that I neither own nor profit from playing with Kazuya Minekura's characters. I also don't own _ice-nine._ That's Vonnegut's.

**"Nothing in this story is true."**

When you first met him, you couldn't tell by looking that he was the man who'd end up destroying the world.

He was young when it all started. He was bored. He was brilliant. He was a science prodigy studying with the fathers of the atom bomb, and he was there when the first atomic flash turned a desert into glass and scalded the New Mexico sky. Later, when an over-eager, shiny-faced reporter asked him whether it was true that one of the scientists had said immediately after the test, "Now science has known sin," he only lit the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth.

"Sin?" He blew smoke in the reporter's face. "There's no such thing."

And then, because Science had already discovered the most terrifying thing in the world and proved it when they dropped the bombs on first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, he left. There was nothing new, nothing worthy of his intellect waiting to be explored in the think-tanks erected on the shifting sands of New Mexico. He walked away. He walked across the glass desert. He walked under the scalded sky. He walked until the soles of his boots hit rock and his head was shaded by clouds.

And then he walked some more.

 

**"Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."**

Eventually, he had to catch a boat.

But first, for a long while, he kept walking. There's a land bridge between North and South America, and he spent some time on it eating _cui_ and _papusas_ and sampling the local liquor. He spent a lot of time in Central and northern South America, actually, sampling the local beauties with their firm breasts and their wide smiles, and sampling still more of the local liquor and local cuisine.

And he kept walking.

He walked into the rain forest. He spent a few years in the deepest, darkest jungles of South America, where he met many people who welcomed him to their villages and still more who wanted nothing to do with him. He spent a month with a band of ecologists gone native and learned how to tickle piranha out of the silty gray-brown waters of the Amazon. The novelty of the experience paled quickly, even though it made a fairly unusual conversation piece. So he walked further south, fomenting suspicion and civil war for entertainment, and found that yes, he was mildly entertained by it all. And then he turned his attention to pharmacology. He spent a year licking frogs, sucking the sap from vines, and gnawing on mushrooms. The mushrooms were lumpy. They were oddly colored and psychotropic, and they took him on faster-than-lightspeed trips to the dark, wavery edges of the universe. He saw nothing that managed to hold his interest while he was there.

He left the jungles and rainforests.

He kept heading south, one careless, slouching step after another, until he'd walked all the way to Cape Froward, Chile. When he got there, he stood on the southernmost tip of the southernmost point of land jutting out into the ocean. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke up at the sky. The ocean roiled and foamed between the rocks, alternately thundering and hissing as it dashed itself against the earth and then slunk away, gathering itself for a second, third, and fourth assault. The ocean sounded like a preacher in a pulpit. It sounded like the fathers of the atom bomb arguing atomic weight and fission and uranium versus plutonium.

To him, it sounded like destiny.

So he caught a boat.

Tide, tradewinds, and a tiny ship called the _Caribbean Canapé_ drove him steadily north. He abandoned the _Canapé_ when it reached the West Indies and discovered that something about the Caribbean appealed to him. It had dark, smooth rum. Its islands had wide, soft-sanded beaches and a dark, bitter history. And it had had, at one time, some of the most famous pirates in the world.

It still had pirates. So it's not very surprising that it was there he discovered the diversions of modern piracy.

He crisscrossed the Caribbean in _The Rabbit Prince,_ a cunning vessel both swift and stealthy, and acquired an eccentric wardrobe. It consisted alternately of a tattered lab coat or a shabby greatcoat that hearkened back to the Golden Age of Pirates, and a buccaneer's hat with a large, piratical plume. He wore the hat at a jaunty angle, the plume sweeping in a dramatic curve down over his shoulder. He stood on _The Rabbit Prince_'s rail, one hand in his pocket and the other pointing with a cigarette, as his crew boarded and plundered. Over the mingled cries of greed and loss, he took an almost childish pleasure in saying "avast" and "scuttle this bucket, ye scurvy dogs" and sometimes even "stand and deliver" in a bored, ironic drawl. He soon found, however, that his humor was wasted on both his crew and his victims—miserable plebeians all, with miserably pedestrian minds.

He was preparing to abandon both ship and crew when he saw the picture on board a small vessel freshly emerged from the Panama Canal. The _Banana Daiquiri_ was representative of all the other ships he'd plundered during his many months at sea. The sight of it filled him with an almost debilitating ennui. He crushed out his cigarette on part of the _Banana Daiquiri_'s cargo—a bale of skin magazines promising "Titillating Niche Erotica!" of midgets and contortionists, and midget contortionists—and was about to call for the _Daiquiri_ to be scuttled and her crew set adrift, but a dirty, waterstained paper scudded across the deck and wrapped itself damply around his ankle. He curled his lip in distaste. He shook his leg.

The paper fell limply to the deck, one waterlogged corner flapping weakly in the Caribbean breeze. The corner flopped over and back, over and back. A knowing smile appeared and disappeared coyly, first obscured then revealed, then obscured again by the corner's fluttering.

He bent down and retrieved the paper. He ignored the words printed in big block letters at the top and in smaller-but-still-emphatic text at bottom. Instead, he concentrated on the picture. A handsome face stared up at him. The face was framed by long, pale hair. It had warm, intelligent eyes hinting at humor and impenetrable secrets.

It had _that smile._

He studied the picture for several moments. He looked at the words bracketing it and read, "WANTED by the Republic of the Cluster Islands for crimes against the State including treason, sedition, and corruption of the citizenry, KOUMYOU should be considered dangerous and …" As he kept reading, his own lips began to curve upward in a reflection of the picture's knowing smile.

He folded the paper and tucked it in his pocket. The sound of the waves slapping against the _Daiquiri_'s hollow, empty hull recalled the ocean at Cape Froward. It faintly recalled heated discussions and shouting in the desert.

The sound carried the unmistakable echoes of destiny.

He had his crew scuttle the _Banana Daiquiri,_ and then he set them adrift in her lifeboats with her crew. Paying their curses and shouts no attention, he tossed his buccaneer's hat into the deep blue water behind him. He waved to his crew, middle finger raised in a final salute, and turned _The Rabbit Prince_ toward the Panama Canal.

Alone, he headed into the Pacific.

He made for the Cluster Islands.

 

**"Sports fishermen recognize the Cluster Islands as the unchallenged barracuda capital of the world."**

If you've never been to the Cluster Islands, you're not missing much. Except, according to the _Cluster Islands Welcome Pamphlet,_ the barracuda fishing.

A very liberal paraphrase of the _Welcome Pamphlet_'s "Abridged History" section might run thusly: "A tiny island nation situated off the coast of Ecuador and consisting of five rocky atolls scattered among a few sharp coral reefs, the Cluster Islands were, up until the beginning of the 18th century, uninhabited. A small fleet of unimaginative colonists looking to conquer a corner of South America were blown there by one of the freak squalls that serve as the islands' formidable natural protection. They called their landing place the Cluster Islands, and they named each blob of rock and sand according to its size and location: Big Cluster, Little Cluster, Middle Cluster, West Cluster, and Far Cluster, which was the island furthest from Big Cluster—a small, impotent afterthought of a comma falling off the end of a paragraph and into the Pacific.

"Over the next two centuries, more ships carrying more accidental settlers found themselves wrecked on one of the islands. Most of these survivors made their home on Big or Middle Cluster. And so life in this small corner of the Pacific continued, mostly uninterrupted but for the occasional freak squall and the even more occasional new settler.

"Eventually, as technology and transportation the world over improved, sports fishermen discovered the barracuda-rich waters surrounding the Clusters.

"Nobody else discovered anything of additional interest, however, and that was that. The Cluster Islands were left to evolve both culture and government mostly in a vacuum. After trying out a few different styles of rule, they settled on a hereditary democracy as the one which suited them best. Every citizen of age has a vote in this system, though only one scion of the Presidential Family ever runs, and then only when the previous president retires or dies in the bed of a paramour (this being the most common method of 'abdication' in the islands).

"The current president of the Cluster Islands is the Lady Gyokumen, who subscribes to the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' school of governing. She has one natural daughter and a stepson. Her hobbies include the national pastime of barracuda fishing, and the crafting of vividly lifelike waxwork figures. These figures are displayed with the many authentic medieval torture devices that can be found in the Cluster Islands Civic Center and Municipal Building. Both the figures and devices are on exhibit year round, until the devices are called for in carrying out the high court's penalties for everything from pickpocketing to murder.

"This does not happen very often. As one would expect, there is virtually no crime to be found in the Cluster Islands."

 

**"A fish pitched up  
By the angry sea,  
I gasped on land,  
And I became me."**

He was caught in a squall on his approach to Far Cluster. The squall was fierce. It was unexpected. It bounced _The Rabbit Prince_ over the sharp knives of the reef to Far's east. On her eighth bounce _The Rabbit Prince_ caught one jagged finger of coral too many and promptly separated into her original, unattached components.

He hit the water and started swimming.

Compelled by the awesome force of the wind and the waves, he was washed ashore on a small, secluded beach. Sand ground itself into his pores. It gritted between his teeth. It scoured skin from his knees and elbows. The sand clogged his nostrils and his ears.

He turned his head to the side, pillowing his cheek on the wet sand, and closed his eyes. He listened to the roar of the wind and the waves behind him and imagined that they were whispering secrets to him. The secrets were maddeningly indistinct and muddled, so he stopped listening.

Some indeterminate time later, he heard a new sound. The new sound was neither wind nor wave.

It was a voice.

"Ah, a gift from the sea," said the voice. It sounded interested and amused. "She always provides, whether wrack or ruin or the odd treasure. Which will you prove to be, I wonder?"

He opened his eyes.

The outlaw Koumyou smiled down at him.

 

**"WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE, REWARD!"**

Koumyou was older than in his picture and far more handsome. He was also far more fascinating.

The outlaw Koumyou was a holy man, and he certainly looked the part.

Koumyou wore a flowing white robe. The robe was cinched at his narrow waist with a soft rope belt. Its hem was heavy and stained with wet sand, and it brushed the tops of his feet as he walked. He wore no shoes, though he carried a pair of flat, hand-woven straw sandals tucked into his belt. He wore his pale yellow hair in a thick plait that hung down to his hips. His hair looked soft and bright as silk in the tropical winter sunshine.

Koumyou's eyes were hazel. They crinkled at the corners when he smiled, and he smiled often. Koumyou's smiles were gentle and knowing, tranquil and enigmatic. They hinted at secrets—secrets that were reflected in his eyes—and at an uplifting, unmatched serenity.

The man who would end up destroying the world couldn't read Koumyou the way he read other men. But instead of being vexed by this, he was entranced. He was smitten. He was intrigued and excited and eager in a way he hadn't been in perhaps his whole life. Something deep inside him vibrated when Koumyou looked at him, when Koumyou spoke to him, when Koumyou smiled at him. He yearned to discover the truths behind Koumyou's eyes and his words and his smile. He yearned to possess the truths for which Koumyou had been outlawed.

He yearned to possess a small piece of Koumyou's soul, probably because he suspected that he had none of his own.

To that end, the man who would end up destroying the world became Koumyou's disciple. Koumyou called him "Ukoku."

Ukoku accepted his new name. In doing so, he accepted his destiny.

 

**"That happiness is mine."**

The first lesson Koumyou taught all his disciples was _muichi motsu._ It means "hold nothing."

"It means that we are all empty," Koumyou would say to each new disciple as he or she sat on the sand, attentive and eager for his wisdom. He would open his arms wide and gesture at the world. He would explain until the confusion in their eyes was replaced by epiphany and understanding.

To Ukoku, he only said, "It means that we are all empty. I suspect that this is not news to you."

"Nope." Ukoku flicked ash into the water and raised his cigarette back to his lips. "Next lesson?"

The second lesson Koumyou taught all his disciples was "love everything." Most of them understood almost immediately and set about doing just that. They loved themselves. They loved each other. They left Koumyou's beach cave and traveled to the other Clusters to love their neighbors, their neighbors' wives, their neighbors' husbands, and even their enemies. But Ukoku, to whom all things had come so easily until he met Koumyou, floundered.

"Fiddle-dee-dee." Ukoku dropped his cigarette just below the tide-line and crushed it with his bare, sand-encrusted foot. The spent waves hissed as they drew back from his heel. "There's no such thing as love," he said. He frowned and ticked off fingers as he recited. "Lust, obsession, passion, desire, need, biological imperative …"

"I can see that you will require more intensive tutoring on the subject," Koumyou replied with a smile. His smile was gentle. It was knowing. It was suggestive. Koumyou's smile, like his eyes, veiled by their pale, beautiful lashes, promised to lead Ukoku to epiphany and understanding.

Ukoku only tapped his chin with the fingers designated as _lust_ and _obsession_ and waited for the revelation to come.

Some indeterminate time later, _lust, obsession, passion, desire,_ and _need_ dug furrows in the sand. Ukoku lay on Koumyou's robe, looking up at the wide, star-speckled skies. A languorous heat spread from the center of his body and into his limbs. His limbs grew slack and heavy.

Their chests pressed together, and against his breast Ukoku could feel the strong beat of Koumyou's heart. Their cocks pressed together, and against the slick, too-hot skin of his shaft, Ukoku could feel the throb of Koumyou's pulse as they slid against one another.

Koumyou's mouth slanted over his. Ukoku tasted honey and salt and the mineral tang of sand. He tried to swallow the flavor. He tried to consume it. Koumyou only laughed softly into his mouth before he lifted himself away.

"Patience," he counseled. He spread Ukoku's knees wide, opening him. Ukoku heard the music of the universe—of the stars and planets, of the black holes and dark matter—rising in one great, swelling crescendo that left him dizzy and gasping as Koumyou penetrated him. His toes curled, gripping the air. His spine snapped into a perfect, graceful arch as Koumyou slid home, filling him and fucking him.

He was transfixed. He was suspended, like a fly trapped in amber, in a perfect moment in time.

"God— _Fuck—"_ he groaned. The secrets of the universe unfurled before his eyes, flashing in bright, pulsing Technicolor as his orgasm was wrenched from him. He came hugely, semen erupting from him in ecstatic spasms.

His orgasm was pure. His orgasm was powerful. His orgasm was a moment of revelation. It was a moment of epiphany. Of course, it wasn't _the_ revelation or _the_ epiphany. Not yet. But as he drifted down from the highest planes of existence and came back from the furthest reaches of the cosmos, he knew he was closer to true understanding than he had ever been in his life.

Ukoku clutched Koumyou to him, winding _lust, obsession, passion, desire,_ and _need_ through his braid. He pressed his lips against the pulse in Koumyou's neck. Koumyou's heart beat out a message in Morse code that Ukoku could almost comprehend.

He was still trying to decipher that message, many weeks and many fucks later. With every climb toward Nirvana, with every pinnacle of physical and near-spiritual release, he got closer. With every pure, powerful orgasm, he nearly broke through.

It was a terrible disappointment, then, when Koumyou was lost at sea.

 

**"You may quote me: 'Man is vile, and man makes nothing worth making, knows nothing worth knowing.'"**

One of the islands' freak squalls blew up while Koumyou was making the trip between Far and Little. "To visit Kouryuu, my son and spiritual heir," he'd said, smiling beatifically. "It's been too long. One day, when I'm gone, he will be the one to brave the Lady Gyokumen's laws and minister spiritual enlightenment and happiness to the people of the islands. He will be the one to teach the poor people of the Clusters to hold nothing and love everything."

They found Koumyou's outrigger canoe broken to pieces and washed up on one of Little Cluster's rockier beaches. His white robe was wrapped around a piece of the outrigger. The robe was torn. It was tattered and pink with blood. The robe, and presumably the body within it, had been savaged by a battery of barracuda.

When he heard the news, something that felt like bitter disappointment but might have been loss lodged like a stone under Ukoku's sternum. The stone was cold. It was smooth and heavy.

With the stone inside him, he was no longer empty.

They never found anything more of Koumyou than his robe and wrecked canoe. The whole Republic of the Cluster Islands mourned his loss. The mourning was, of necessity, done quietly and privately. The mourning period lasted for nearly two months.

Ukoku did not mourn. Nor did he leave the islands that had taken Koumyou and the promise of true understanding from him.

Instead, he found himself a job. He went to work for the Lady Gyokumen.

Over the next several months, Ukoku made himself indispensable to the Lady Gyokumen. He made himself indispensable by upgrading her collection of medieval torture devices.

He built an automated, electric rack. It was energy-efficient and could run on a standard pack of nine-volt batteries. He built a self-heating iron maiden which tapped into one of the natural vents that brought heat from deep within the earth to Big Cluster's surface. He crafted a mobile electric chair. The Lady Gyokmen's collection, he said with a raised eyebrow, could do with a modern device for contrast. Charmed by the way the chair whirred and clicked and periodically loosed its full 2,000 volts as it rolled through the Civic Center and Municipal Building's halls, she increased his Research &amp; Development and Fabrication budgets. In thanks, he built her a self-contained quartering yard, complete with mechanical, fire-breathing horses. Her ministers agreed that it was a nice touch, if a bit "Inquisitor's wet dream." They were more receptive to the gyrating, random-interval dunking chair he constructed next. They appreciated the salt-resistant coating on the metal. They appreciated its suitability for a small nation surrounded by the sea.

His budgets were increased again. When they brought him the news, he smiled a tight, cruel smile and lit a cigarette. He thanked them for appreciating the "majesty of the instruments of justice." He blew smoke in their faces and flicked the cigarette onto the pile of ashes and butts in the corner. The pile was gritty and dark. It was gray and malevolent. It crouched in the corner like an ominous portent.

He received no personal visits from the ministers after that. That suited him fine. He wanted no interference as he worked on his final and greatest project, which was to be more amazing and terrifying than the atom bomb. His final and greatest project was to be more amazing and terrifying than a thousand atom bombs.

His final and greatest project was to be _ice-nine,_ a theoretical construct he'd overheard two fathers of the atom bomb discussing in the most hypothetical terms.

_Ice-nine_ was, theoretically, a seed that would teach water molecules to freeze at room temperature instead of at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. It would teach water molecules to remain frozen until they reached _ice-nine_'s melting point of one-hundred-and-thirty degrees Fahrenheit. _Ice-nine_ would be relentless. It would be inexorable. And _ice-nine_ would be inevitable. Every drop of water that _ice-nine_ touched would arrange its molecules into more _ice-nine,_ and so on and so forth until every water molecule in the world, every puddle and stream and river and ocean and raindrop, was locked into the crystalline structure of _ice-nine._

_Ice-nine_ was no longer hypothetical. It was no longer theoretical.

Nearly one year to the day after Koumyou was lost, Ukoku created _ice-nine._

 

**"And then he said, 'Now I will destroy the world.'"**

He wore a white suit. He had on a black shirt under the jacket. The shirt was open at the collar. The shirt's top two buttons were undone, revealing a wide V of skin and a strange locket. The locket was small and cylindrical. It was metal and had a rubber gasket-sealed lid. It bumped against his chest as he walked.

The locket glittered in the hot tropical sunlight.

He walked from his laboratory beneath the Civic Center and Municipal Building to a quaint seaside restaurant. He sat at a table situated on a wooden deck that jutted out over the water. A squalling child seated two tables away stared at him and redoubled its screams. The child's fat tourist parents shrugged once apologetically, but they otherwise ignored its shrieks. He caught its eye. He folded his fingers into the shape of a gun and cocked it. He took aim at the sky, at an albatross flying overhead.

"Bang," he said quietly. He grinned at the suddenly silent child as the albatross fell into the ocean. It landed with a splash.

When the waitress arrived to take his order, he asked for a sparkling water with a slice of lemon. She brought it and stood expectantly, but he ignored her. Eventually, she left, her face dark with displeasure.

He took a sip of sparkling water. He lit a cigarette. He squeezed the slice of lemon into the glass and took another sip, and listened to the gentle murmur and hiss of the waves and the babble of the people around him. The water sparkled on his tongue, individual bubbles exploding and dying on his taste buds. He heard a hushed voice at the waiter's station say something that sounded like "… heard Kouryuu has spent the last week planning a memorial …"

He set the glass at the edge of the table. It was half empty. Tiny bubbles raced from the bottom of the glass to the water's surface, where they broke with inaudible _pop!_s. He removed the locket from his neck, and the lid from the locket. He tipped the locket over. Something small and blue that winked coldly in the hot sunlight fell into the glass.

The bubbles ceased their racing. They ceased their exploding and dying. They hung there, little speckles of air petrified in _ice-nine._

He dropped the locket on the table and went for his pocket to retrieve another cigarette. As he did so, his elbow bumped the glass of _ice-nine._

"Oopsie," he said. And he smiled as the glass hit the deck and rolled over the edge, into the ocean.

 

**"AH-WOOM."**

That's what the end of the world sounded like.

It was the sound of a destiny fulfilled at last.

 

**"He wasn't sorry about anything."**

The earth was torn apart by violent, apocalyptic winds when all the water in the world turned to _ice-nine._ Buildings broke, tectonic plates shifted, and people died. Those who didn't fall in the first cataclysmic minutes were picked off by the supertornadoes that reached down from the sky and blasted everything in their path.

Some people survived in the caves that dotted the Cluster Islands. Others huddled together in shallow basements, praying that their shelter would escape the tornadoes. Predictably, few of their prayers were answered.

Three days after the world turned into a vast desert of _ice-nine,_ people began to emerge from hiding. Many of these survivors became victims almost immediately. They got _ice-nine_ on their hands, both accidentally and on purpose, and licked their fingers. They were instantaneously transformed into statues, turned into _ice-nine_ themselves. The statues were uniformly blue. They were adamant and opaque, and they shattered when they were tipped over.

The survivors of the survivors banded together. They discovered that if they managed to light a fire or generate enough heat in other ways, they could melt chunks of _ice-nine_ back into their original state. They could melt the chunks back into water, back into apples, chickens, and gin and tonics. They could not, however, melt life back into the dead.

And so the days went, an endless cycle of melting, accidental and purposeful licking, and the shattering of _ice-nine_ statues. The number of survivors dwindled. Those left were on the edge of despair.

And then they saw a figure in the distance. The figure wore a white suit. He had on a black shirt under the jacket, its collar and the top two buttons undone. The open neck of the shirt revealed a wide V of skin. When he got close enough, they could see his smile. His smile shone, white as wind-scoured, sun-bleached bone, from his tanned, sallow face.

He stopped and sat with them for a while. He smoked a cigarette, then two, three, and more. When night fell and the shadows grew dark, he told them a story. It was a story about destiny. It was a story about the end of the world.

The story began in New Mexico. It finished in the Cluster Islands.

The story ended when he stood up and smiled. As they sat, frozen in their disbelief, he turned away from them and began walking. He walked away. He walked across the vast _ice-nine_ desert. He walked under the dark, wind-torn sky. He walked, one careless, slouching step after another, until they could see him walking no longer.

 

****

end


End file.
